1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus that processes an image captured by a stereo camera and detects an object.
2. Description of Related Art
Generally, in the detection of an object by image recognition, it is not easy to detect a smoky object such as steam or smoke at a fire that has little change in brightness and light texture. Hence, various techniques of recognizing a smoky object reflected on an image have been proposed.
For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-30225 discloses a technique of recognizing white smoke by dissolving a color image into R, G and B components, obtaining hue images from color component images and obtaining an intersection of the color component images and hue images. Further, with the technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No 2004-30225, detection accuracy is improved by extracting a difference between a current image and an image captured Δt time ahead. of the current image to distinguish an object such as cloud having a same degree of brightness as white smoke.
However, the technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-30225 is not applicable to monochrome images, and may be influenced by environment. Further, when a camera is mounted on a moving body such as a vehicle and an indoor mobile robot, the camera itself moves, and therefore is influenced by a background, whereby it has difficulty in precisely detecting smoke.
In view of foregoing, it is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an image processing apparatus that can precisely detect a smoky object by eliminating an influence of a background.